sacred resource protection zone, protect yellowstone wolves, protect the wolves

Y’stone fringe wolves tend to hunt livestock 

In Protect The Wolves, Protect Wyoming Wolves, Protect Yellowstones Wolves by Twowolves4 Comments

sacred resource protection zone, protect yellowstone wolves, protect the wolves

Wyoming making an attempt to justify the slaughter….. Doesnt give them the right to call our Sacred Species Vermin either… on another note, We have to wonder the comparison between Rustlers…. or natural causes, neglect cars, humans etc….

A long-running Wyoming Game and Fish Department refrain is that wolves that roam far from the Greater Yellowstone’s wild interior are treading into “unsuitable habitat,” where they inevitably kill livestock and won’t desist.

Cattle and sheep frequently clash with the large canines, the contention goes, and the wolves end up being lethally targeted and eventually wiped off the landscape.

The argument has been used to justify Wyoming’s controversial predator zone, which allows wolves to be treated as pests and killed indiscriminately in 85 percent of the state.

The idea that far-flung wolves have a taste for beef and mutton proved accurate a year ago.

Incompatible on the fringe

“When wolves establish in those fringe areas,” Game and Fish Wolf Biologist Ken Mills said, “they just aren’t compatible, and they don’t persist long-term because of conflicts with livestock.

“All of the fringe packs — Pinedale, Lander, the Cody region — they all overlap with livestock, and they all had conflict last year,” he said. “Or if they didn’t, they traditionally did.”

In 2016 13 of the 14 packs whose home ranges marked the boundary of wolf range in Wyoming were implicated in the deaths of livestock. All told the 13 packs killed 60 cattle and 83 sheep. The federal managers in charge of wolf management last year gunned down or trapped and killed 47 fringe pack lobos in retaliation, actions designed to stem the conflict.

Those numbers come from a recently released U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report that summed up Wyoming wolf activity in 2016. The document is attached to the online version of this story at JHNewsAndGuide.com.

The lone pack that stuck to wild prey a year ago, the Prospect Mountains Pack, roamed southeast of Pinedale on the flank of the Wind River Range.

Mills said he has seen no evidence that the Prospect Mountains Pack has hung on since an appeals court ruling returned wolf management to Wyoming in April.

Livestock bloodshed was not confined to the outskirts of the Greater Yellowstone region.

 

Source: Y’stone fringe wolves tend to hunt livestock | Environmental | jhnewsandguide.com

Comments

  1. Such bullshit! Where did this “biologist get his credentials? The Florida Keys studying jellyfish? It us not the wolves that are doing anything unnatural here. The cows push out the ungulates and desecrate the environment. Get the damn cows off public land.

  2. Wolves keep the sick animals thin out of nature’s wildlife. Don’t prey on our wolves protect them. Protect all gods creature’s.

  3. Unfortunately NASS USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service only reports livestock deaths by cause every five years. Here’s their 2011 loss statistics, the most recent published online:
    http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/nass/CattDeath//2010s/2011/CattDeath-05-12-2011.pdf
    5.5% of losses were claimed due to predators. Of that, over 1/2 was caused by domestic dogs. 9.9% of the 5.55 was claimed due to coyotes. I use the word claimed, because NASS depends upon self-reporting by producers. This assertion does not require corroboration by expert forensic scientists, but is possibly relatively accurate.
    Over 94% of preslaughter deaths are due to nonpredator causes.
    Wyoming NASS stats are more concise as to specific predators. Looking at
    https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Wyoming/Publications/Annual_Statistical_Bulletin/bulletin2011.pdf
    we find that losses due to wolves ’08 through ’10, the most recent year published, are claimed to be under two percent of all nonslaughter mortality (The stats appear to be rounded off, and the departure from the national reported predatory losses. Since the tiny domestic dog predation reported in WY differs substantially from the national while the approximate percentage predation total remains similar, those rounded-off reports are yet more suspect as to data integrity/truth. See page 43 of the publication )

    Actual data are further skewed and inaccurate due to some livestock producers failure to use conflict prevention and poor husbandry; this problem is far more common in the sheep industry, although in one state almost the entire livestock loss was due to a single producer who refused to use proper traditional lambing methods.

    Although the above article refers to Wyoming, the problem of unaccompanied range cattle is an artifact of the USA’s poor husbandry practices resulting from the eradication of large predators. The WY agency’s use of the term “incompatible” subsumes that poor practice.
    Wildlife biologists know that elk will mingle with other ungulate species, while the deer species tend to avoid foraging with unrelated animals.

    “Vermin” is from the Latin word for worms, and sometime in English history, the word was misapplied to any organism competing for herbivores hunted or grown by humans.

    Because almost all winter habitat in the mountain west has either been acquired by private interests or leased for grazing by BLM or other management agencies, it is often fenced. Private interests tended to seek the better-watered areas, fencing out native wildlife. This is the most visible aspect everywhere outside of higher and more rugged terrain.
    Only small islands like Yellowstone national Park have unfenced valley habitat, and there occurs the only significant example of unfenced relatively unspoiled and ecologically complete habitat with which to contrast. Yet YNP, at over 7000 ft. elevation, is not truly winter habitat, and all large nonhibernating species .attempt to seasonally migrate.

    Herein lies the incompatibility – all downstream lands are exploited by humans, and native species excluded to one extent or another, whether purposely or inadvertently.
    The same rationale is expressed against the Mexican Wolf down in New Mexico and Arizona, even though the incompatibility is entirely generated by commercial exploitation. Management of ungulate populations in Rocky Mountain (and other) states for promotion of hunting opportunities is the only other factor in states’ political evaluation of wolves.

    Wolves cannot reach ecologically effective populations, doing their complex job shaped by nature, only recently corroborated by scientific study of reintroduced and early stage recovery of a very few local populations. Yet, North American indigenous tribal societies generally understood that wolves both had an equal right to live and forage as do humans.

    In Alaska and elsewhere, biologists quantified the feeding habits of wolves, discovering that in some seasons as much as 85% or more of their diets consisted of carrion – animals dead from nonwolf causes. Thus, in terms of ecological economics, wolves serve more than the well-studied predator purposes in improving healthy ungulate populations. the much-Euroamerican-maligned nd persecuted coyote, and other mesopredators, and animals right down to songbirds, once kept house, as it were, without human interference by performing carrion removal services.

    The subject is more nuanced than I can present in comment, and almost all assertions and evaluations by “sport” hunting and agricultural interests range from grossly inaccurate to entirely fictional.

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